Polish Corridor

The Polish Corridor was a strip of land ceded by Germany to the newly-formed state of Poland at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. The Corridor gave Poland access to the Baltic Sea, but it also divided East Prussia from the rest of Germany. The area had a significant German minority population, and the Nazi regime in Germany used trumped-up charges about the treatment of that population, as well as the status of the Free City of Gdańsk, as the pretext for launching their invasion of Poland in 1939.